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8. School funding 8.1
The funding of schools should be fairer and more transparent, enabling schools to meet the needs of their pupils. Extra resources should clearly follow those pupils who might need extra help and support, such as pupils from poorer backgrounds. Our current system falls well short of this. Over recent years, more money has gone into schools’ budgets overall, but its distribution has not been fair. At present, as demonstrated by the graph below, inequalities in the funding system lead to huge variation in the money similar schools receive. We compared 72 secondary schools outside London, with similar size and intakes and found a variation in funding per pupil from just below £4,000 to well over £5,500101.
Variation in budget share plus grants per pupil in 72 secondary schools without sixth forms, with 1,000-1,250 pupils of which between 9–13 per cent are eligible for free school meals, outside of London Budget share plus all grants per pupil (£s)
6,500 6,000 5,500 5,000 4,500 4,000
School
3,500 72 secondary schools ranked by variation in per pupil funding
8.2
At the same time, only around 70 per cent of the money that is intended for the most deprived pupils is actually allocated to schools on that basis102. And the funding system has become increasingly opaque and unresponsive, with the money that schools receive depending more on what they received in the past than the characteristics and needs of pupils in the school now. Post-16 funding, although distributed on a more transparent basis, is also inherently unfair, with school sixth forms being funded on average £280 more per student than general FE colleges and sixth form colleges103.
8.3
The protection of the schools budget in the recent Spending Review, which sees real terms growth in school funding at a time when cutting the budget deficit is an urgent national priority, does not mean that there is no need for efficiencies to be made, and is a major investment in the future of the country. Our aim is that money is distributed more fairly so that it is the schools most able to make efficiencies which are asked to so do.